Recently, I talked with veteran journalist, Medill lecturer and former ESPN sportscaster Melissa Isaacson about her athletic experiences on and off the field.

Melissa’s life is interesting because it straddled Title IX. She began to see changes while she was still young.

“By junior high school, we suddenly saw girls teams starting up,” she says. “We were peripherally aware of Title IX. We followed Billie Jean King’s career and knew she was part of a national dialog. We realized we were the first generation of girls to get to compete.”*

But old ideas die hard. In 1907, the state of Illinois (where Melissa grew up) had banned girls’ interscholastic competition. Overall, the only approved sports for girls at the time were those considered ladylike.

“Girls could play the genteel sports like tennis, badminton and golf,” she says. “Anything that wasn’t bumping boys out of the gym.”

Melissa and her friends hung out at the Little League fields, peering through the chain link fences, wanting desperately to be on those fields, but knowing that they couldn’t be.

Even after Title IX passed, team sports like basketball — Melissa’s favorite sport — were still considered unladylike. For girls just a few grades ahead of Melissa, only one sport available to them, a synchronized swimming sport called Aquasprites. The team had no trouble attracting members.

“Girls were desperate for the opportunity to play any sport at all,” Melissa says.

Competition, that dirty word

Melissa remembers “play days,” organized one-off events in which girls from different schools were brought together and randomly assigned to teams. The emphasis wasn’t competition — the girls were just supposed to play for fun. By not being allowed to play consistently with the same team members, the element of competition was muted.**

She also remembers after-school “postal tournaments.” In these events, sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, schools gave girls an occasional chance after school to compete in sports like swimming, bowling and “basket-shooting.”

But still, competition wasn’t really the point. After the event concluded, girls’ individual times were written on postcards and mailed to the Illinois High School Association (IHSA), the governing body for state sports.

“If the participants were lucky, they’d find out the results, or who ‘won,’ a month or two later,” Melissa says. “It really cut down on the drama of competition.”

Still, Melissa persevered. She had an inner drive to compete that was all consuming.

“I would endure anything, any pain, to play. I was always thinking, ‘What more can I do? Where can I find more opportunity?’” she says. “I could have played all day, all night. I would have gone to the gym in my pajamas at midnight to practice if I had to.”

Finally… basketball!

By the time she got to high school in 1975, change was in the air. Despite Title IX, her high school, Niles West in suburban Chicago, had been resisting adding girls sports. The principal had repeatedly petitioned the state to allow girls sports like swimming, volleyball and softball. Basketball was out of the question — there was no way girls would be allowed to take up boys’ valuable gym space.

“I can’t reason with those crew cuts,” he complained about the IHSA.

But in the winter of 1974, his efforts paid off. Melissa’s school was allowed to add a girls basketball team, and a PE teacher, Arlene Mulder, stepped up to coach girls sports.

Once basketball became the focus of her world, Melissa found ways to take advantage of any opening. She and some of her teammates, along with members of the boys team, would head for the gym at 4 a.m. to practice together, but she had to keep that to herself.

“It was all a big secret. I was considered weird, too much like a boy. I felt like I was walking a tightrope all the time,” she recalls. “My mother wasn’t against it, and the boys kept the secret, but society was still against it.”

To Melissa, Arlene Mulder became more than a coach; she was a mentor. She and the girls on Melissa’s basketball team became the subject of her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation. It’s the story of the team’s 1979 state championship title. We’ll pick up Melissa’s story next time.

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* Quotes in the present tense (says) are from my telephone interview with Melissa Isaacson on April 19, 2022. Quotes in the past tense (said) are from her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation (Chicago: Agate Midway, 2019). https://amzn.to/3yBR0cf

** In my March 26 blog post, Debbie Millbern Powers also talks about play days. She chafed against the regulated play that kept girls from developing their skills and teamwork in the way boys could. https://www.nancybkennedy.com/cookies-and-punch-with-the-enemy/